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Rebuilding offer tied to crackdown on Uighurs

China has offered to help the Taliban rebuild Afghanistan in exchange for their co-operation in eliminating terrorist groups it says are stoking unrest among its Muslim Uighur population.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister and the man who led negotiations with the United States to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan, met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi for talks in Qatar this week.

Wang has pledged that China will help to ‘‘rebuild the country’’, and has called for United States President Joe Biden to lift sanctions against Afghanistan. After the Taliban seized power, more than US$9 billion (NZ$12.5b) in Afghan central bank reserves held in the US was frozen.

Wang told Baradar that the Taliban had to combat ‘‘terrorist threats’’ and crack down on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (Etim), which threatened China’s ‘‘national security’’.

Beijing has long said that the group, associated with a small number of Uighur Muslims who travelled to Afghanistan in 1998, is behind the supposed terrorist threat used as justification for a brutal crackdown in northwestern Xinjiang province.

It is unclear whether Etim still exists in any operational form, despite Beijing’s push to cast it as the force behind unrest in its Muslim-majority province. The group was founded by Hasan Mahsum, a Uighur from the Kashgar region listed as China’s most-wanted terrorist before being shot dead by Pakistani troops in 2003.

The US has branded China’s actions in Xinjiang genocide, a judgment supported by several Western nations.

More than a million mostly ethnic Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang have been detained and subjected to forced sterilisation, ‘‘re-education’’ and torture, or forced to perform slave labour, according to international observers. Human rights organisations have accused Muslim countries of an orchestrated silence against the abuses, in deference to China.

Baradar is said to have assured Wang that the Taliban would ‘‘never allow anyone, any force to do things that harm China from Afghanistan soil’’.

The meeting was the clearest indication yet of the expanded role in Afghanistan that China wants to play following the withdrawal of Nato troops.

China has vast investment interests in Afghanistan – which has deposits of copper, gas, gold, lithium, oil and uranium – as part of its global infrastructure project known as the Belt and Road initiative.

World

en-nz

2021-10-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281921661258031

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